Several years ago, around Halloween, I was informed of a sickening and racist story while leading a workshop at an affluent, mostly white, local high school. As part of a writing exercise on persona, I asked students what costumes they planned on wearing for Halloween. The class laughed nervously and all eyes turned to Robert. “What’s so funny?” I asked. Robert explained he had been suspended for two weeks the previous year for the costume he wore. “What could be so bad?” I asked.
“I went as a Mexican,” Robert said, with no apparent remorse.
“What does that mean? I asked. How could you dress ‘as a Mexican’?”
“Simple,” he said. I wore dirty flannel clothes and carried around a Fisher-Price lawnmower. No one else in the class was laughing now, and it seemed that no one else shared his bigoted views.
I tried to salvage the discussion – talking about stereotypes as sort of super-imposed, one-size-fits-all costume, a simple-minded attempt at characterizing an entire people in a cheap two-dimensional manner. I even tried to indict Robert and people like him as posers, trying to assert a superiority over other people, people of whom they had very limited knowledge. I’d like to say I made a difference, that I made Robert see the light, but no such conversion took place that day.
* * *
Even though Daphne graduated from high school over10 years ago, she remains one of my most memorable students for something she said outside of class. In fact, it was on graduation day. While wearing her cap and gown she came over to say, “Thank you for teaching a poem by a Mexican author. It made me feel like I could do something great.” The poem in question was “A Tree Within” by Octavio Paz and the class had occurred five years earlier in an 8th grade Language Arts class. Frankly I didn’t remember the poem leading to a particularly successful class discussion, nor do I remember Daphne as having been moved in any way by the poem. What was significant was the mere fact that we had read a poem in class by a Mexican author.
I had a similar experience in my own school life. I remember taking an Anglo-Irish Lit. class in grad school in which we read Yeats poems and the Joyce story “The Dead,” which features a scene set in Oughterard, County Galway, my father’s hometown. For the first time in my life, I was proud to be Irish-American. Suddenly, my white trash, Mick roots were cool and European. My father, himself a laborer, who also wore a uniform of flannel, who left school in the second grade to work, and who had never learned to read, had given me the cachet of cool. How I loved to hear the professor say that Joyce was the greatest writer of the century and that tiny Ireland, one-fifth the size of Illinois, had produced four Nobel laureates. “A litter better,” he’d add looking over the horizon line on his bi-focals, “than Illinois has done.”
* * *
What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Mexican”? As someone who has never traveled to Mexico, my first associations are artists, the Mexican authors I’ve read or painters I’ve admired at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago. “What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Irish?” I have spent much of my life assuming people picture drunkards and terrorists,
I have no illusions that we can eliminate stereotypes merely by presenting global voices to our students. But I think it is important that students have a chance to read great writers from other cultures, and that the powerful words of these writers can challenge our narrow world-view.
As the speaker of that Paz poem Daphne admired so much puts it, “There, within, inside my head/the tree speaks./Come closer – can you hear it?”
Have you ever felt represented by literature? When has literature challenged a stereotype you or someone you know has held?
I will always remember when I was in high school and a particularly supportive English teacher lent me a copy of Howl. I was dazzled by the “Angel-headed hipsters” until I encountered the word Cock, and quickly closed the book. I probably didn’t open it again for a week, but when I did, easing myself back into the poem’s rhythm and images, I moved past “The Word” and finished the poem. Over and over again.
Posted By: Zach Wood on October 16, 2009 at 12:18 pmAs a young gay teen, I’d spent so many years up to that point with the derogotory, diminishing terms and slurs, that after reading something of such visceral beauty (at the time it was like nothing I’d ever read) I couldn’t believe it had been written by a gay man. Allen Ginsburg’s poetry laughed at the assumptions that had been hammered into my consciousness, and changed me as a writer, and a person, forever.
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“The Canadian Embassy helped smuggle six U.S. diplomats disguised as Canadians out of Tehran in January 1980 after the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy the previous November.”
Posted By: Colin Ward on October 17, 2009 at 2:01 amReport this comment
Cracker is a stereotype, from its origin and still today, that has always interested me, having Cracker in my blood on the distaff side. Ethnically they started out as lowland Scots sent to Ireland by the English to do an Englishman’s dirty work as occupying yeomen. In Elizabethean England the term was derrogatory, denoting a braggart. Then these yeomen intermarried, producing Scot-Irish. Historically a restless folk they immigrated to America, entering through the mid-Atlantic states. They made their way into the mountains (hillbillies), down into Alabama, Georgia, and into Florida (rednecks, Georgia Crackers and Floridia Crackers). Also west they went (Okies). By the late 19th C they were living in the foothills of the Cascade mnt range of the Pacific Northwest. They would bring with them possums and moonshine making. They would also bring with them the racist views held by some. In the twenties Oregon had the largest chapter of the KKK in the country.
They’ve been looked down on by practically everybody. A class thing. And they’ve tended to be an unruly lot. In Florida under Spanish occupation they could be squatters. Later they would become cattle wrestlers whose cowboy wars got deadly. In the Appalachians their feuds were famous and violent. During slave holding times a Cracker, or cracka, could be employed as a slave driver feared for the crack of his whip. As late as the 1980s in south Florida whole towns got their income on cocaine smuggling. I have a deceased uncle who was a career criminal, bootlegging in the twenties, embezzling in the fifties, and growing marijuana in the eighties. One historian has explained this penchant for the illegal as an expression of an anti-authoritarian inclination. It’s an explanation I can buy. A yeoman will always be a yeoman no matter the times or means.
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, himself of Cracker descent, recently wrote a book extolling the virtues of Crackers, how they’ve always been given the shitty jobs, either in the coal mines, the tobacco fields, in the savanahs, or in the swamps, and how they’ve maintained a kind of independence in their way of proceeding. (When he was not preaching my grandfather was managing turpentine farms in north Florida’s pine forests.) I think he is right, even if I also think he chose to overlook the dark side of Cracker independence, which amounts to a degree of amorality.
But here is the thing. Cracker has for long been the English-speaking world’s “N” word. And now it has come full circle.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cracka
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cracker
I guess stereotyping cuts all which ways. Once a class pejorative, now racist.
Terreson
Posted By: Terreson on October 17, 2009 at 4:47 pmReport this comment
Why did we get this lengthy urban dictionary/wikipedia disquisition on crackers? Your claiming of some kind equality of the oppressed is weird at first glance, and then offensive at second– right out of the backlash conservative playbook. Stereotyping does cut all which ways, but its effective cutting is pretty clearly in one direction.
Posted By: Teri G. on October 19, 2009 at 4:09 pmReport this comment
Teri G says: “Why did we get this lengthy urban dictionary/wikipedia disquisition on crackers? Your claiming of some kind equality of the oppressed is weird at first glance, and then offensive at second– right out of the backlash conservative playbook. Stereotyping does cut all which ways, but its effective cutting is pretty clearly in one direction.”
I am guessing Teri G has not yet come to terms with class discrimination, which is very much alive in America. I’ve recently realized there is a new kind of discrimination, that based on meritocracy. Lawyers only hear other lawyers. Doctors only hear other doctors. MFAs only hear other MFAs. The intelligensia only hears other intellectualls And so forth.
Teri G if you think I am a Rush Limbaugh type you are full of shit and reading your own script having nothing to do with me or reality. Class has always been the greater
problem, much more serious than ethnicity or race. So prove me wrong.
Terreson
Posted By: Terreson on October 19, 2009 at 8:56 pmReport this comment
“Poser” is spelled “poseur.”
Posted By: melmon farth on October 19, 2009 at 10:54 pmReport this comment
I really meant the “street” version of the word here. (Did I mention I teach teenagers?) “Poser” is also in the Webster’s dictionary next to my desk.
Posted By: John S. O'Connor on October 20, 2009 at 9:19 amReport this comment
Hi John,
Thanks for the post. and Thanks for your work as a high school teacher.
I want to begin with a confession, but I confess I don’t know what confession to begin with.
First Confession:
As someone who self-identifies as Mexican but who does not pretend to speak as a representative of any “Mexican” group, I don’t find Robert’s costume idea “sickening” and actually think that it is rather humorous.
The humor of the costume lies in its contradiction of work and play. Had Robert used a real lawnmower in addition to the dirty flannel clothes the joke would have fallen short. But the use of the Fisher-Price mower was a stroke of comedic brilliance.
It is not the costume then that is offensive, but the Hobbesian attitude behind it. We laugh, Hobbes argues, at the failings, infirmities, and absurdity of others because that ridiculing allows us to conceive our own eminence. What is sickening is Robert’s imagined superiority. And, John, thanks again for addressing this problem in your classroom.
I do think, though, that this imagined superiority goes far beyond Robert. What should the lesson be? To respect and value those who work for us and who are beneath us in class and social standing. Or should we ask Robert to question his privileged status at this mostly white affluent school and the notable absence of the “Mexican” at this same school. What is sickening is how imagined superiority naturalizes the historical and economic factors that allows the lawnmower to become a symbol for the “Mexican.”
Second Confession:
When I was 16 I spent my summer working la yarda. Adolescence is a time of identity crisis. I wanted to work for a landscape company because I, as Robert did, identified being Mexican with the lawnmower. My aunt’s husband worked for this landscape company, so did a friend of the family who was living with my aunt and her husband. More importantly so did Carlos, the 16 year old brother of my aunt’s husband. Carlos had recently arrived from Mexico and when given a choice to work or to go to school he decided to work. I had become good friends with Carlos. I wanted to show that I, too, could be a good “Mexican,” so I decided to work alongside Carlos. I was privileged enough, however, to work only for the summer. I always knew that I would return to school in the Fall.
Carlos still works in the landscaping business. For some people, the lawnmower isn’t a stereotype but a livelihood. Carlo’s life, though, can’t be reduced to the lawnmower. He goes home to his wife and two children.
Third Confession:
I first learned of Octavio Paz on April 19, 1998, the day he passed away. I read of his death in one of the local Spanish newspapers in Houston. The headline grabbed my attention: “Literario Mexicano Octavio Paz Ha Fallecido.” It grabbed my attention not because it announced the death of the Mexican Nobel Laureate—my confession is that I had never heard of Paz—but because the combination of “literario” and “mexicano” sounded so strange to me. A Mexican man of letters? I spent the rest of my Spring 1998 semester at the University of Houston reading everything by Paz that I could get my hands on.
Though I admire the work of Paz, I’m not sure he is the right poet to bring up in battling the stereotypes of the “Mexican.” I would argue that Paz is as far removed from an understanding of the Mexican with the lawnmower as Robert is. John, your post shifts from the yard worker to the major Mexican intellectual of the 20th century without complicating the class differences between the two. Paz knew that his experience differed from the experience of the Mexican worker in the United States. In the controversial first chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz describes the pachuco in particular and the Mexican-American in general as “one of the extremes at which the Mexican can arrive.” If we want a literature that battles negative stereotypes of the Mexican in the United States, we should turn not to Paz but to Chicano/a Literature. And because the focus of the discussion has been the yard worker, I would recommend the poetry collection The Date Fruit Elegies by John Olivares Espinosa. He has a beautiful poem that challenges our images of the yard worker: “Grass Isn’t Mowed on Weekends.”
Fourth Confession:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/10/worst_halloween_2.php
<>
Now I have to rethink my costume for this Halloween.
Fifth Confession:
To answer your last question, John, I think the poetry of James Wright challenged some stereotypes I had. Not sure what specifically those stereotypes are, but I’m sure they have something to do with Terreson’s claims for class as a problem.
Posted By: Javier O. Huerta on October 19, 2009 at 11:15 pmReport this comment
The Village Voice article and the comments underneath are astounding. Here we have class, race, and gender all degraded in one hilariously outre Halloween costume, the sexy illegal alien! It’s a hat trick of privileged condescension!
Posted By: Glen on October 20, 2009 at 9:37 amReport this comment
As a Mexican, unlike Javier, I do find the whole joke pretty offensive.
Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that
1) Javier must have been very young (or very badly-read) to have discovered Octavio Paz as late as 1998, and that
2) what I find surprising of his being surprised at the “Literario Mexicano..” headline was because of the unusual combination of words, and not because “literario” is the wrong adjective in this context (it should have been “literato.” “Literario” is a quality of objects and phenomena, thus an adjective: “literato” is a man of letters, thus a noun.)
Needless to say, as a Mexican and as a writer, I don’t see anything wrong with the combination of the nationality with the profession.
Posted By: Ernesto on October 23, 2009 at 3:29 pmReport this comment
Javier,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. Your response was so incisive you’ve dragged me from the sidelines to the comment fray.
Your right: the offense is caused by the assumed superiority. When I told the story to some students recently, one said, “Couldn’t someone come as a Mariachi musician, say, without being offensive?” Maybe.
The class issue you bring up is dead on as well. Paz is a sort of absurdly patrician figure in Mexican letters. And maybe I should have had that class read Latino poets like David Hernandez or Luis Rodriguez, for example. I guess I was trying to offer a sort of polar-class-opposite. The first time I thought about my father’s “station” was when I applied to college and had to fill out his “profession.” I almost cried when he said “laborer.” I thought it would doom my application.
My Halloween costume idea (which I thought of long before the post, btw!) is to go as a prawn from District 9, an interesting recent movie on this whole topic.
Last, James Wright is just about the last poet I would have expected to challenge stereotypes. I’d be interested to hear more about that.
Thanks again for your comment — and for all the comments! I really do appreciate knowing that people find some of these topics interesting and/or useful.
Posted By: John S. O'Connor on October 20, 2009 at 10:04 amReport this comment
James Wright is just about the last poet I would have expected to challenge stereotypes.
So you haven’t read him, then.
Posted By: melmon farth on October 20, 2009 at 11:38 amReport this comment
Perhaps relevant to the discussion here:
“Blackface and the Poetry Foundation?” [second post down]
http://www.digitalemunction.com/
Kent
Posted By: Kent Johnson on October 20, 2009 at 12:44 pmReport this comment
How is that relevant to this discussion? Explain please, Mr. Johnson.
Posted By: Glen on October 20, 2009 at 1:26 pmReport this comment
The great Mexican poets — Paz, back to Xavier Villaurutia and José Gorostiza, and on through Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco and Homero Aridjis and the very powerful figures born in the middle of the last century, David Huerta, Alberto Blanco, Elsa Cross, and Coral Bracho, on down to younger writers like Jorge Fernández Granados and others we haven’t heard from yet, are products of a highly elite system of classical education — you can bet your ass they know how to scan — and supportive grants and publications.
There was a very interesting “desencuentro” between Mexican and Chicano poets in Hayward, California a few years ago. The kick-ass Chicano writers, including Juan Felipe Herrera and Lorna Dee Cervantes, were decidedly browner than their polished upper-middle Mexican counterparts. The Chicanos, educated here, were highly political, and very conscious that they were a generation at most from working-class roots. The Mexicans felt they had a high culture to defend.
The Chicanos were anxious for the approval of the Mexican poets — Huerta, Cross and Bracho among them — representing the “madre patria.” The Mexican poets — indoctrinated against the political poem by Paz — were condescending, and talked down about the way the Chicanos spoke Spanish.
As an Anglo poet and translator fluent in Spanish I was one of the few present not on either side of that particular fence. All kinds of class stuff was at work, and the work of Paz, Blanco, and Herrera equally inspires the sixth-grade barrio kids I teach, but with younger Chicano poets such as John Olivares Espinoza, we’re getting beyond the false dichotomy between kick-ass and polished.
Posted By: John Oliver Simon on October 23, 2009 at 5:05 pmReport this comment
Like I said, what trumps both the violence of racial discrimination and the horrors of ethnic cleansing is class discrimination. The patricians of competing ethnic and racial groups will, always have, more easily relate to each other than to the lower classes of their own group. Said patricians understand, always have, that the maintenance of their class superiority is predicated on the put down, and thus the common ground they share. Why this should be so hard to get, and still open to debate, is beyond me. Shelley got it. Pushkin got it. Victor Hugo got it. So did Paul Robeson.
But in the end none of this parochial squabbling matters. What trumps it all is the killing off of nature. Ain’t nobody guiltless of that. It pains me to realize how poets, in America at least, are generally insensible to the murder. Jeffers was right you know. The perfect metaphor for describing the preoccupations of the human race is incest: way too preoccupied with ourselves, especially when we define ourselves against competing groups of other human animals, to notice the killing off of nature. But this too is old news.
Terreson
Posted By: Terreson on October 24, 2009 at 3:43 pmReport this comment
Hey Tere,
Just yesterday a friend was telling me about the slang term “peckerwood” (aka “peckawood” via Faulkner):
“2. slang (esp. in African-American usage). depreciative. A white person, esp. a white person regarded as poor, rustic, or unsophisticated;” (from the OED)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=peckerwood
Does race trump class discimination or vice versa? I think they are inextricably linked. Sometimes it isn’t race but ethnicity that is the issue. Think the Irish 19th century America.
Posted By: Rachel on October 25, 2009 at 1:34 pmReport this comment
Erin go Bragh!
We Irish survived!
As did we all.
Now, let’s do the numbers.
This race, that. This nation, that.
Same planet. Same death!
Time to figure it out, no?
Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on October 25, 2009 at 2:02 pmReport this comment
Terreson:
Fantastically well put!
You have hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, if humans could ‘get it’, would we even be in this predicament? I tend to agree with some evolutionary biologists who believe that overpopulation is genetically mandated. It is Nature’s mechanism of survival…no matter how many die, some will live.
As Wolf Larsen said in ‘The Sea Wolf’: “Nature is a spendthrift.”
Posted By: Gary B. Fitzgerald on October 25, 2009 at 1:00 pmReport this comment
We all have stereotypes. That is perfectly normal. As a human being, woman, raised catholic, converted atheist, literature by career, web strategist by profession, single but in love, I don’t like Javier’s quoting and I disagree with him on his “Confessions” but I try to respect his background.
Back in 2000 studying English at McGill, the assistant of the Hard Boiled Novel teacher class told me “you Mexicans are like dwarfs, you will never get English literature as well as us, don’t even try to”.
I don’t know why he said that… I never carried my Fisher-Price lawnmower to class.
I just discover this site and this forum thanks to @ernestopriego’s twitter, thanks.
Posted By: yume on October 25, 2009 at 6:19 pmReport this comment